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thats almost exactly the Mercuri system. User manipulates a control to cast their vote, system prints a ballot that is human and machine readable, user verifies that the ballot is correct, ballot is stored. Additionally, it is possible to give the user a receipt that can be used to verify that their vote was cast correctly, but without revealing what the vote was, which might be an important thing to put on the receipt.

The Brazilian government converted to fully electronic voting in 2000, deploying over 400,000 kiosk-style machines. Although our elections are often compared to those in the US, they are actually quite different because the voters cast ballots by using numbers assigned to each candidate (this is necessary because of a high degree of illiteracy here).

Concerns regarding accuracy of the self-auditing systems caused the legislature to mandate a retrofit of 3% (some 12,000 machines) to produce a paper ballot that the voter could peruse and deposit in a box for recount (the first large-scale use of the "Mercuri Method" -- described more fully here "A Better Ballot Box?").

These paper-trail machines were successfully used during the October 6, 2002 election, and it is hoped that their other machines will eventually be retrofitted as well. Further discussion on this subject can be found in the article: "The importance of recounting votes" by Michael Stanton (originally published in Portuguese as "A importância da recontagem de votos", on the website of the Agência O Estado de São Paulo, November 13, 2000, http://www.estadao.com.br/tecnologia/coluna/stanto n/2000/nov/13/194.htm). There is also an informative website: Brazilian Electronic Voting Forum by Amilcar Brunazo Filho.

The future of wireless security is 802.11i But this standard uses a different encryption scheme than WEP, therefore some hardware upgrade will be required. There is an interim standard called WPA that combines some features of 802.11i with the encryption algorithm of WEP allows only software/firmware upgrades.

IEEE 754/854 has not changed for some time now, but it does have some problems and a revision is currently being worked on. See http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/revision.html.

In any case, it could be that we're finally on to something here.

More information here:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/TG2.html

The IEEE had a very interesting article in Spectrum magazine on the issue of portable electronics and flight safety.

The conclusion was that there is little doubt about the interference and it is not just cell phones. The article relates an incident when too many people listening to the radio (there was some "important" sports match going on) did cause noticeable interference. It seems that in most cases the pilot can notice that some instruments are providing inaccurate readings (thanks to having redundant information around, different instruments would be affected differently) and it doesn't become a big problem.

So, by using your high-frequency electronic devices inside the plane you're making the pilot's job more difficult. During cruise flight it may be less risky and during takeoff and landing it is definitely not recommended. Personally I wouldn't even trust that much those skyphones. I'd rather err on the safe side. Read a book!

Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment designed to show up the second law of thermodynamics (which states that entropy must never decrease in a closed system). In this example the "force field" (the plasma valve) isn't really doing any sorting of particles; it's just sitting as a static barrier between the air on one side and the (expensive-to-maintain) vacuum on the other.

Incidentally, Maxwell's demon doesn't violate either quantum mechanics or the second law of thermodynamics, for the simple reason that he has to _see and remember_ the particles to be able to sort them. Since the demon doesn't accumulate and store an infinite amount of information, he has to forget about each particle after a while. Landauer argued and Bennett proved (1982) that erasing the demon's memory introduces a tiny amount of entropy that makes up for his devious sorting. Entropy does not decrease, and the second law is preserved.

Prior Art

So, there are a couple of people who have schemes for running power over cat5. As long as you pick 2 of the 4 unused wires, this isn't really a problem. I run my phone through the blue pair on the cat5 coming into my room- means I only have one cable snaking through the hall. While marking it certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, I'd say anyone who unplugs my beer and tries to plug the cable into a laptop deserves whatever they get.

I don't know where you got the idea that the IEEE lied about the tech worker shortage. In fact they activly lobied against the H1B's claiming that there were plenty of older EE's that could be cheaply retrained.

IEEE-USA and other organizations representing engineers, computer
scientists and health care providers opposed enactment of the new law on
the grounds that IT worker shortage claims were overstated and because of
concerns about the limited applicability of the worker safeguards.

Welcome to my web page on how to make a simple ECG (electrocardiograph - also known as an EKG). Here you will find information how how to build one with less than $10 in parts. But before we get started, let's take a moment to talk about shop safety. Be sure to read, understand, and follow all of the safety rules that come with your power tools. Knowing how ....ummmmm, sorry. I guess I got into a little New Yankee Workshop moment there. :) Anyways, I do want to talk about safety. This device requires you to strap electrodes across your chest. This is inherently dangerous. Both because of the pain caused by sticky tape pulling hairs out of a person's body and also because even small currents can kill. Do not attempt this experiment if you are not comfortable around electrical devices. I am not responsible for any harm you may cause yourself. I have done everything I can think of to make this safe, but don't come crying to me if you find yourself dead.

Now that I've started with this positive note, I can begin. I've split my web page into two sections. One for the impatient - who would like to make their own NOW. And the other for people who would like a little commentary from me. Oh, and those of you who just want to see the final product and don't care about the details, just skip to the Results. Happy reading!

Quick Details on building your own ECG

In Depth Information about my ECG

Introduction - What is an ECG? History behind it. What was I thinking?!

Some Stuff Sought Out - Miscellaneous things that I needed but didn't have

Adventures in Analog Land - The primary amplification circuit - all good ol' analog

Plenty of Programming - The visual basic source

Results - Maybe it's not perfect, but I think it's COOL!

Future thoughts - I still think I'm perfect, but I'm ready to argue these specifics

Notes - I didn't make this all up. Here's proof!

Not bad for about two weeks of work, eh? If any of you have any comments, questions, insults, etc; please email me. Thanks for coming.

Welcome to my web page on how to make a simple ECG (electrocardiograph - also known as an EKG). Here you will find information how how to build one with less than $10 in parts. But before we get started, let's take a moment to talk about shop safety. Be sure to read, understand, and follow all of the safety rules that come with your power tools. Knowing how ....ummmmm, sorry. I guess I got into a little New Yankee Workshop moment there. :) Anyways, I do want to talk about safety. This device requires you to strap electrodes across your chest. This is inherently dangerous. Both because of the pain caused by sticky tape pulling hairs out of a person's body and also because even small currents can kill. Do not attempt this experiment if you are not comfortable around electrical devices. I am not responsible for any harm you may cause yourself. I have done everything I can think of to make this safe, but don't come crying to me if you find yourself dead.

Now that I've started with this positive note, I can begin. I've split my web page into two sections. One for the impatient - who would like to make their own NOW. And the other for people who would like a little commentary from me. Oh, and those of you who just want to see the final product and don't care about the details, just skip to the Results. Happy reading!

Quick Details on building your own ECG

In Depth Information about my ECG

Introduction - What is an ECG? History behind it. What was I thinking?!

Some Stuff Sought Out - Miscellaneous things that I needed but didn't have

Adventures in Analog Land - The primary amplification circuit - all good ol' analog

Plenty of Programming - The visual basic source

Results - Maybe it's not perfect, but I think it's COOL!

Future thoughts - I still think I'm perfect, but I'm ready to argue these specifics

Notes - I didn't make this all up. Here's proof!

Not bad for about two weeks of work, eh? If any of you have any comments, questions, insults, etc; please email me. Thanks for coming.

It is possible that the 802.11g AP you buy will support the final version with a Firmware Update. However, I personally think anyone investing anything in 802.11g right now is wasting their money, too many things could change between now and June

Actually Linux is becoming a big player in the embedded world. Several companies offer both hard real time, and near real time OS's that are either modified Linux kernels, or preserve binary compatibility with Linux, or provide a hard real time kernel, which then runs a instance of Linux as one of its tasks.

Check out these articles from IEEE Spectrum
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/mar0 1/nlinu.html

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /dec01/embed.html

for more on why the "small, 100% completely understandable and predicatable systems" vs. general, complex operating systems battle ground is shifting, and why Linux is getting design wins.

Actually Linux is becoming a big player in the embedded world. Several companies offer both hard real time, and near real time OS's that are either modified Linux kernels, or preserve binary compatibility with Linux, or provide a hard real time kernel, which then runs a instance of Linux as one of its tasks.

Check out these articles from IEEE Spectrum
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/mar0 1/nlinu.html

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /dec01/embed.html

for more on why the "small, 100% completely understandable and predicatable systems" vs. general, complex operating systems battle ground is shifting, and why Linux is getting design wins.

IEEE Spectrum Magazine's topic for the month of May is "Invasion of the Music Snatchers." A number of copying and filesharing attacks and counterattacks are discussed.

Many of this month's articles are online, but if you are not an IEEE member you are limited to the "publicfeature" URL's.

IEEE Spectrum Magazine's topic for the month of May is "Invasion of the Music Snatchers." A number of copying and filesharing attacks and counterattacks are discussed.

Many of this month's articles are online, but if you are not an IEEE member you are limited to the "publicfeature" URL's.

Sigh. People just don't make links any more. If they did, it would get around slashdot's reformatting and make life easier for everyone in general.

I don't know why slashdot doesn't have this built in.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/apr0 3/book.html
ok... I got it from some search engine...

Google on smell sensors faq

Smell with a digital sensor

cyrano sciences

How Smell Sensors Work

. . .

Perry, Tekla S. and Geppert, Linda. "Do Portable Electronics Endanger Flight? The Evidence Mounts". IEEE Spectrum Magazine, September 1996.

I quickly found two cases in this this article where navigation equipment was affected: one with a laptop computer, and another when approximately 25 people on a flight from Denver, Colorado to Newark, New Jersey were all using portable radios to listen to a football game. The CD player was just part of a theoretical thing at the beginning.

Here's a message that I wrote to The Reg in response to that article:

Well, I note that the piece is labelled as an opinion piece. I can only assume that's to cover the author's laziness in *not* tracking down data: despite the author's wanting to "see data, not unreasoning fears", the only data the author presents to counter the airlines' regulations on RF transmitters on board is annoyance and statistically insignificant anecdotal evidence.

If the author had made any attempt at finding some hard data, he/she would have found this article published in the September 1996 issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/sep96/featur es/air1.html

Unfortunately, only the first page of the article is available for free, but I remember reading it in the print version of the magazine. I assume the closest university library would have a copy of the issue in question.

As I said, I did read the article when it came out, and they cited one case where passengers listening to a baseball game on AM radio during a flight caused some of the navigation electronics to go wonky. Immediately after flight attendants asked them to turn off the radios, the nav system went back to normal. But these passengers would, after a few minutes, turn their radios back on again which again FUed the nav system. After a couple of warnings, the captain asked the flight attendants to confiscate the radios.

It's the information. Have you actually listened to some of the things that they're demanding you not use? The last few lists I have heard rattled off before takeoff have included GPS devices. What? GPS devices are passive, they are receive-only. So what does the airline care if I have one connected during the flight?

Second, use of GPS devices in flight is at the discretion of the airline and the captain of the airliner. Most US airlines either do not prohibit, or specifically do allow, use of GPS receivers during flight (not during takeoff and landing). If you have any question or concern about that, the First Officer or Captain is usually standing by the cockpit door during boarding and you can ask her if it is OK to use the GPS.

And finally, while airlines do some things to maximize revenue, they also do a lot of things strictly in the name of safety. Since the exact effects of RF interference from consumer electronics are not known, some airlines play it safer-than-safe and do not allow them in flight. That is their call and quite sensible.

sPh

I found the article's comment about the need for the NSF to motivate standards in wireless sensor networks to be strange, since the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is due to be published any day now (the final draft is alread for sale at the IEEE online store). The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for low cost, very low power consumption wireless sensor networks; it has a raw over-the-air data rate of 250 kb/s, operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, and can support peer-to-peer multihop (so-called "mesh") networks with device duty cycles below 3 ppm.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is being used by the ZigBee Alliance, an organization of more than 50 large and small companies, to establish networking and application profile interoperability standards, much like Wi-fi has done with IEEE 802.11. The ZigBee Alliance will have a session open to the public at its next meeting, in Berlin June 3.

The IEEE 1451.5 wireless sensor standard, which will standardize sensor discovery and data formatting, is at an earlier stage of development; proposals are now being presented.

With all this activity, it's not clear to me just what the NSF is expecting to standardize.

I found the article's comment about the need for the NSF to motivate standards in wireless sensor networks to be strange, since the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is due to be published any day now (the final draft is alread for sale at the IEEE online store). The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for low cost, very low power consumption wireless sensor networks; it has a raw over-the-air data rate of 250 kb/s, operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, and can support peer-to-peer multihop (so-called "mesh") networks with device duty cycles below 3 ppm.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is being used by the ZigBee Alliance, an organization of more than 50 large and small companies, to establish networking and application profile interoperability standards, much like Wi-fi has done with IEEE 802.11. The ZigBee Alliance will have a session open to the public at its next meeting, in Berlin June 3.

The IEEE 1451.5 wireless sensor standard, which will standardize sensor discovery and data formatting, is at an earlier stage of development; proposals are now being presented.

With all this activity, it's not clear to me just what the NSF is expecting to standardize.

I found the article's comment about the need for the NSF to motivate standards in wireless sensor networks to be strange, since the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is due to be published any day now (the final draft is alread for sale at the IEEE online store). The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for low cost, very low power consumption wireless sensor networks; it has a raw over-the-air data rate of 250 kb/s, operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, and can support peer-to-peer multihop (so-called "mesh") networks with device duty cycles below 3 ppm.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is being used by the ZigBee Alliance, an organization of more than 50 large and small companies, to establish networking and application profile interoperability standards, much like Wi-fi has done with IEEE 802.11. The ZigBee Alliance will have a session open to the public at its next meeting, in Berlin June 3.

The IEEE 1451.5 wireless sensor standard, which will standardize sensor discovery and data formatting, is at an earlier stage of development; proposals are now being presented.

With all this activity, it's not clear to me just what the NSF is expecting to standardize.

Recently, there has been a large amount of hype for hybrid networks that use a combination of free space optics and WiFi. Basically the free space optical heads provide a high speed mesh @ 1.25GB/s or so, and the WiFi provides the breakout links. There is a paper up on IEEE eXplore by Jinlong Zhang: "A Proposal of Free Space Optical Network for Broadband Access" that comes to mind as being useful.

You may be interested in this article in IEEE Spectrum by James Oberg, where he explains how and why the Shenzhou is significantly different from the Soyuz.

Basically, the Shenzhou is a bigger and has an orbital module capable of independant flight, something very new. Part of the reason why is that although the Chinese tried to buy a Soyuz from the Russians, the only one they were able to obtain was pretty much just a shell, having had most of its flght systems removed prior to delivery.

IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD

IEEE Std 802.3z-1998, Gigabit Ethernet.
IEEE Std 802.3aa-1998, Maintenance Revision #5 (100BASE-T).
IEEE Std 802.3ab-1999, 1000BASE-T.
IEEE Std 802.3ac-1998, VLAN TAG.
IEEE Std 802.3ad-2000, Link Aggregation.
IEEE Std 802.3ae-2002, 10Gb/s Ethernet.
IEEE Std 802.3ag-2002, Maintenance Revisions #6.

P802.3af, DTE Power via MDI.
P802.3ah, Ethernet in the First Mile.
P802.3aj, Maintenance #7 Task Force.
P802.3ak, 10GBASE-CX4 Task Force.

No big deal.

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From grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/16/pub/buzz.html

What People Are Saying about 802.16 This dated list includes an incomplete but nonselective collection of external references. If you have items that you'd like added to the list, notify the Working Group Chair, who compiled it.

How much is a pre-wired house worth to you? Nothing, there are many less troublesome, relative easy to implement, and low cost options.

What will this do for community building? The last mile is not in the interest of the telco's to implement. Telcos' control of the customer will be marginalized (maybe lost) by providing ATM-VPC, VPN, VoIP, .... However, if the third link concept (listed below, Airship) ever takes-off, then the last mile problem will quickly end in many locations.

Possible Solutions (what wire/cable are y'all talking about? Is there a problem in the house?:~):

14Mb/s Apartment/Condo linked to switched-hub to Switch in basement/attic.

http://www.homeplug.org/index_basic.html

11Mb/s Home/Apartment/Condo W-LAN (low power) linked to HomePlug Access point.

http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/main.html#Tu torial

Last Mile Connection to the internet/intranet/... is comming.

http://www.airship.com/prod/uses_telecoms_frames.h tm

OldHawk777

Reality is a self-induced hallucination.

IEEE Spectrum also has an article dealing with the future flash technologies in the current issue

What we need in this space are standards for courseware - metadata standards, tool interoperability standards, etc.

• IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC)
• IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.
• 
  

  Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.).

  This sort of thing was supposed to be encompassed (again, in the corporate/military world) by a buzzword acronym from a couple of years ago: "LCMS" - Learning Content Management System, combined with a much more venerable acronym "LMS" - Learning Management System. Of course, lately, companies that offer one claim to also offer the other ("You got your LMS in my LCMS!" "You got your LCMS in my LMS!").
  
  

I guess the IEEE does not count ? Yes, you too can go ieee.org and get your UNIQUE address space

So, which one are you?

A very interesting (and insightful) account of the first two days of the trial can be found here

Not only did the other parties settle, they settled for huge amounts of money. First Data settled for $4 million. This, of course is on top of nearly a million dollars in other settlements from other victims, and on top of a $2.6 million settlement for Stambler's previous bogus patent. A nice way to make $7.5 million.

OC192 Re-submitting a story from 5 hours ago is one thing, but from 4 years ago ? :P

To clarify; most of JC's inovations were not his own, but the results of research done by others. His skill was in seeing what could be done with it. In other words, he benifited greatly from others work. This is his way of repaying the favour.

This is an interesting look at this on the IEEE website.

Carmack (and ID) are great assets to OpenSource thinking.

I know for a fact that drivers for these cards DO exist within Broadcom. I participate in the 802.11 committee, and have sat next to a Broadcom employee running linux on "unsupported" broadcom hardware. These drivers are NOT likely to be released by Broadcom. Same goes for some other chipset vendors BTW.

Consensus seems to be that if enough (potential) customers ask the product vendors (in your example, that would be Linksys, NOT Broadcom), they will produce and release drivers for linux, as Linksys has done in the past.

Note that there will probably NEVER be totally open source drivers for these. As software controlled radios, there are FCC issues. I don't pretend to understand all the issues, or agree, but I have been told essentially the same thing by several different engineers working for at least three companies.

I also don't give a rats ass if released drivers contain a closed binary only module for the software radio functions. I just want to be able to use the hardware.

A related question: is anyone working on implementing the 802.1x supplicant code which will be required to support operations using TKIP and/or CCMP, the new ciphers specified in the 802.11i DRAFT? Microsoft has devoted major resources to this, and has promised support for XP and I believe 2000. 802.1x is used for key management and distributed authentication, BTW.

Relevant standards schtuff is here

Note to Slashdot Editors: Bite me. I asked virtually the same question on the 4th of February and you rejected it.

IEEE is working on a standard (IEEE P1619) which will allow encryption to shared media (SANs I guess). They've set up a working group.

They're looking at (from the website):

• Cryptographic algorithms for storage
• Cryptanalysis of existing and proposed systems and protocols
• Key management for storage
• Attacks on storage area networks and storage systems and countermeasures
• Standardization approaches
• Deployment of secure storage mechanisms
• Defining and defending trust boundaries in storage
• Relating storage security to system and network security.

Something to look at in the future. Hopefully it'll be more secure than WEP. :)

Not sure if it is totally related to your effort, but the IEEE has a real nice standards site.

There is also a page there specifically set up for development of standards.

It includes:

Working Group Development
Writing the Draft
Ballottig the Draft
Final Approval
Publishing a Standard
Reaffirming the Standard

and has a link to IEEE Standard Forms.